Saturday, December 24, 2011

Structure of the Critique

Our structure is the
opposite of MGK’s. Whereas they begin with minutiae and nitpicks and only
discuss ‘the big picture’ (policy) in the latter phases of each book, we follow
the only logical and acceptable academic convention, which is to start with
overall context before analyzing the camp structures and killing methods. This
context fills chapters 1-4 of the work, which establish overwhelming proof of
decisions to exterminate Jews before we even move inside the camps proper. This
proof would exist independently of the perpetrator, survivor and bystander
witnesses that we present in chapters 5-8; but those witnesses would also
constitute independent proof by themselves, because there is simply no
possibility that any power could ever co-ordinate so many testimonies across so
many times and places whilst silencing all those who would have witnessed
resettlement or who would have participated in the hoax that is integral to all
denier arguments.

The detailed structure develops as follows. Chapter 1,
written by Nick Terry, examines the failure of MGK to come to grips with the
‘discovery process’; that is, the process by which Aktion Reinhard became known
to the outside world. We show how MGK are unable or unwilling to comprehend how
wartime knowledge was acquired and disseminated, and how the crimes were
investigated and prosecuted after the war. Chapter 2, by Jonathan Harrison,
discusses MGK’s unwillingness to confront the gradual radicalization of Nazi
policy from March 1941 to July 1942, which they evade by turning historians of
the process into strawmen and by imposing nonsensical thresholds, such as the
insistence that a final, inflexible Hitler decision to kill all Jews (fit and
unfit) must be proven to have been made by the end of September 1941 with no
allowance for radicalization thereafter.

Nick Terry’s chapter 3 places the history of Aktion
Reinhard into the context of Nazi policy in Poland and shows how and why the
Lublin region was finally chosen as the region in which so many Jews would be
killed. It exposes MGK’s manipulation and incomprehension of documents relating
to the evolution of the program. Chapter 4, primarily written by Jason Myers,
demonstrates that Jews could not have been resettled in the East by showing the
economic and political realities that pertained in the Nazi-occupied USSR. It
also exposes MGK’s double-standards of evidence, as they rely on hearsay
witnesses who come from the same survivor population whose testimonies MGK
dismiss when they describe extermination. Jonathan Harrison contributes a
section on the Ostland that demonstrates the ignorance of Kues about that
region’s demographics and documentation. Sergey Romanov contributes the
internal Soviet statistics about the GULAG camps and so-called special
settlements, which shows that USSR did not hide hundreds of thousands foreign
Jews during or after the war.

Chapters 5-8 move to the insides of the camps and the witness
accounts that describe them. In chapters 5 and 6, on gas chambers and camp
witnesses respectively, Jason Myers shows how perpetrators closest to the
action usually gave the most detailed accounts, and this was notable in how
their trials were structured. For example, Erich Fuchs was charged with
actually operating the murder weapon. It is therefore absurd to play off his
testimony against that of a hearsay ‘steam chamber’ witness, as if their
evidential value were the same. The chapter shows convergences and how these
clearly over-ride the nitpicking of MGK over minutiae. The fact that Bauer and
Fuchs described an engine as the murder weapon clearly matters far more than
whether one or other could not accurately recall, over 20 years after the
event, every minor detail of the crime scene. The latter would require far more
accuracy of memory than is ever likely to occur in a trial held two decades
after a crime. Chapters 5 and 6 also have material contributed by Nick Terry
and Sergey Romanov which reveals that there are many witnesses that MGK have
never discussed.[130]
Furthermore, there are perpetrators who gave detailed accounts while living in
freedom: Eichmann in Argentina; Rauff in Santiago; Suchomel, Hödl and Gomerski
after their release. Again, we would ask any rational person to consider the
possibility that all of these would have colluded in a hoax, or given such
testimony unless it was true.

In Chapter 7, Roberto Muehlenkamp presents the known
forensic and archaeological evidence about the mass graves and refutes the
related arguments of Mattogno, Graf and Kues, especially their attempts to make
believe that the graves are not compatible with or do not necessarily indicate
large-scale mass murder. Chapter 8, also by Roberto, is dedicated to deconstructing
MGK’s farcical claims that cremating the murdered victims’ bodies at the Nazi
extermination camps would have been an impracticable undertaking as concerns
fuel requirements, cremation time and disposal of cremation remains.

The drafting and redrafting of chapters was a
collaborative effort, so each author had some input into most chapters, even if
only a few sentences and footnotes. We take collective responsibility for any
errors, which we will endeavour to correct both in the blog and in any future
editions of this text. While each of the authors has been studying Aktion
Reinhard for several years (mostly for longer than Kues has been doing), this
critique has been written without pay in our spare time during evenings,
weekends and vacations. None of us has ever been paid for our activities, and
we have not employed professional editors and proof-readers.

In addition, we have had to co-ordinate our drafting
across long distance and to negotiate stylistic differences. Two of us live in
the USA (one a native, the other an immigrant from the UK); one of us lives in
England, one Portugal and one in Russia. Two of us use English as our second or
third language, and there are notable differences between British and American
spelling, punctuation and usage. Not all these differences can be easily
eliminated.[131]

This study is therefore necessarily a ‘white paper’ with
rough edges. We anticipate that some of the feedback we receive from readers
will recommend the fixing of various typos and stylistic inconsistencies that
inevitably infiltrate a ‘first version’ of this kind of work. We would note
that MGK’s texts are often error-prone, even though they use fewer sources than
we have done, so we make no apology for publishing a critique that is unlikely
to be totally error-free. We do, however, undertake to respond to reader
queries, advice and corrections, albeit on a timescale of our choosing.

Of course, some of that ‘advice’ will come from deniers
and will be made in bad faith. Given that deniers seem incapable of reading a
book from front to back, we anticipate that many denier readers will start with
the gas chamber chapter and then respond with personal incredulity. They will
ignore the long sections on discovery and wartime knowledge (chapter 1),
overwhelming proof of extermination decisions (chapter 2) and the twisted road
to Belzec (chapter 3). They will refuse to accept any burden of proof to show
that there was a hoax (chapter 1) or to show systematic evidence of
resettlement, not the cherrypicked hearsay crap that Kues hypocritically
parades as evidence (chapter 4). All these things would be mistakes. The
critique is intended to be read as a whole, and the arguments advanced in each
chapter have not been put forward independently of each other.

We also hope that this critique will be of value to those
interested in the Aktion Reinhard camps and the Holocaust more generally,
rather than in the often narrow pseudo-debate conjured up by Holocaust deniers.
Although this work is not a comprehensive history of the Aktion Reinhard camps,
we believe that general as well as specialist readers will find much of
interest in these pages.

No serious scholarly project is
ever completed without help from others, and our critique is no exception. For
regular active assistance throughout this project, we thank David Woolfe, Mike
Curtis, Dr. Andrew Mathis, and Dr. Joachim Neander. For translating and
clarifying Brazilian sources on Gustav Wagner’s arrest, we thank Roberto
Lucena. For pseudonymous aid and advice, the kibitzers KentFord9, Hans,
bluespaceoddity, Dogsmilk and nexgen586 were invaluable to us. Pooshoodog
provided the crucial ammunition of humour when we finally lost patience with
denier trolling at RODOH. Special thanks are also due to Peter Laponder for
making available copies of his maps of the Reinhard camps for use in this
study. For answering queries and assistance with materials, we thank Steve
Tyas, Jürgen Langowski, Albrecht Kolthoff, Christian Mentel, Harry Mazal, Professor
John Zimmerman, Dr. David Rich, Professor Andrzej Gawryszewski, Professor
Christopher Browning, Dr. Martin Dean, Dr. Michael Gelb, Professor Antony
Polonsky, Andrea Simon, the JDC Archives Section, Martin Davidson, Dr. Philip
Blood, and Leonid Tyorushkin of the Holocaust Foundation, Moscow. Although we
have greatly valued all of these individuals’ assistance, none of them are
responsible for the interpretations and arguments we advance in these pages, or
any errors that may be present. For all of those, the authors of the critique
take full responsibility.

[130]We have
cited from interrogations in German, Polish and Russian. The original language
can be distinguished as follows: Vernehmung or Vernehmungsprotokoll for German,
Protokol for Polish, and Protokol doprosa for Russian.

[131]For
instance, several different editions of Schelvis’ work on Sobibor and
Hilberg’s foundational work on the Holocaust have been used across this
critique.